


apsis

by ThinkingCAPSLOCK



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Character Study, Families of Choice, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Light Angst, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-28
Updated: 2016-06-28
Packaged: 2018-07-18 17:14:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7323850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThinkingCAPSLOCK/pseuds/ThinkingCAPSLOCK
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the most extreme points in an object's orbit (and Keith is slipping out of orbit)</p>
            </blockquote>





	apsis

**Author's Note:**

> shiro is the greatest father of modern television

Keith slams the automatic door open as he leaves the office. Hands digging into the narrow gap, muscles straining as he throws it back on its own mechanics. He hears the machine chur, the electronics sputter, and when it closes behind him, it's agonizing. 

It doesn't open, or close, fast enough. The words follow him into the hall.

He's become problematic. No amount of talent (and it isn't talent, it's never been talent, how can talent exist for something so foreign as flying? It's hard work, it's _hard_ ) will keep him in this program if he doesn't use his brains and smarten up. He has to stop picking fights. He has to stop talking back. He has to stop skipping class and showing up late. 

They want his work ethic, but they don't want him. 

The instructors, the higher ups, are quick to blame and slow to understand. Keith knows he's done enough on his own to go without more formal education. Why attend a class he already understands the applications of? Why listen to them speak as if they know more than him, just because they're older? He knows how to fly, he knows what to do. He knows it better.

It's not his fault this leads to tension (with his peers, who are jealous, who see him as a rival or a threat or someone to beat instead of just working harder themselves. With his instructors, who won't call on him or always call on him, who expect too little or too much. With the administration, who remind him again and again that they didn't have to take him on, they didn't have to welcome him into the school, that he's there on their time and money and the sliver of kindness the vastness of space hasn't vacuumed away from them yet). It's not his fault he has nowhere else to go. 

His teeth set, his fingers clench, and the words grab the tails of his shirt, seep into his boots. Each step (more of a run at this point, really) down the hall brings the words afresh to his mind.

_You're out of control._

_This is a school for serious cadets, not a charity._

_This is your final warning._

That thought halts his storming, a jolt of lightning from spine to stern. His vision clouds. The final warning, the fifth this month, and this one came with the flash of anger and the undertone of finality. This one came with a promise spewed into his face, the two feet of oak-wood table the only thing that kept the spittle from landing on his cheeks. There would be no more lenience. 

Keith's about had it with their kind of lenience. 

He slams his hand into the wall, as hard as he can, seeing the faces of the instructors and peers and his fellow pilots, but it's not a wall, it's a door. An open door. An open door with a figure standing in it, looking down at him, under dark lashes and raised eyebrows, a fist buried in his chest.

Keith knows him at once. He'd know him from the other side of the facility, from across the world. Takashi Shirogane. 

-

To his surprise, Takashi Shirogane doesn't get angry, or yell, or even look frustrated. He eases a step back (and Keith's fist is frozen, shock and ice, in the air where it landed, and he feels his arm muscles strain but he cannot break through either substance) as if he gets punched in the chest daily while visiting cadet schools. He brings one large arm up in a wave, then uses it to push through the shock and ice and place Keith's arm back at his side.

"Hello," he says. "I think you've got the wrong door." 

Keith's anger hovers, simmers, beneath his skin, but the outlet is back at his side, and he's at a loss of what to do. He opens his mouth, but the words he wants to say are not the words he wants to say to Takashi Shirogane. It closes again as the sentences slide down his throat like cold water. His body is rigid and awkward. He feels his hair, disheveled, sticking out, tangles and knots in every direction. He feels each improper, unironed crease of his uniform, a fire on his skin. 

"I'm Takashi Shirogane, but just call me Shiro," says Takashi Shirogane. 

Keith still has no words, so he acts on instinct. He steps back, salutes. Salutes? But the arm's in the air, angled off his temple, and his feet are together, back straight. "Sir, my name is Keith! Keith-"

"There's no reason to call me sir," Takashi Shirogane says, a laugh coming out of his mouth, and from his headshake, it came uncalled for. He shifts through the doorway, into the hall, and Keith has to move to make a space for his large frame. Takashi Shirogane crosses his arms on his chest, one hand rubbing his chin, the other folded neatly in the spot where forearm and bicep meet. "Y'know, you look like you're having a rough day. How'd you like to tag along with me for a bit, Cadet Keith?"

The words pop out of Keith's anger, air out of a balloon, popped unexpected. Loud. Sudden. "Excuse me, sir? Shirogane? What?"

"C'mon," says Takashi Shirogane. "Follow me."

Keith follows. He doesn't look back. 

-

Takashi Shirogane gives him a tour of the wing, which is bizarre, because Keith knows it better. He lives two hallways down in a dorm that holds his only possessions, which he's presently without. But he follows, by some force of nature, or perhaps just regular politeness. His anger a muted throb in the back of his mind as he takes the same footsteps of one of the men who, in three months' time, will be standing on Kerberos. The man on the moon, come to Keith. 

None of this seems to phase, or even cross the mind, of Takashi Shirogane, and he moves through the building like he's been here a million times (though it didn't exist when he was training, there was only a hope, a distant pleasure, in thinking they could have students train as astronauts, to explore the depths of space). He's proud, his eyes catching the light and shifting the energy to his smile. Here's the mess hall, Keith. And down this way are the anti gravity chambers, Keith. These are the offices (and he smiles as he continues), which you might already know, Keith. 

He does already know. But he doesn't say. He just watches, mouth half open, eyes half glazed. He wonders if he doesn't understand like the instructors don't understand. Or, if no one really understands this man, and that's why they're sending him to the furthest reaches of space.

Takashi Shirogane turns and smiles. "This is the roof, Keith," he says. 

-

Keith has never been to the roof before. 

The desert stretches on, beyond the horizon, into the first stars of twilight. The heavy lights of the training school dissolve, quickly, into the red rock and dusty landscape, into the orange fire of the sun. Takashi Shirogane stands with his arms behind his back, at the edge of the roof, looking outwards. Keith hovers three steps behind, one to the left. He has no idea why they're here.

Takashi Shirogane glances over his shoulder, nods his head. Keith closes the gap, face forward, eyes darting to the side to keep watch. 

"So, Keith, do you want to be a pilot?"

An easy question. He heard this not half an hour ago, from the mouth of the man with the power to expel him. "Yes, I do."

"Why?"

That question is not what he expects to hear on the roof, and not from Takashi Shirogane. His guard is so shaken the response slips out without filter. "I want to prove I can. I want everyone to see I can."

Keith's eyes latch onto the last slipping of light, the distant and impossible to reach star at the centre of their solar system. He thinks of the sunsets from his childhood, darker, more distant, from grubby windows and smoggy rooftops. Cold and early in the winter, late and humid in the summer. Heavy with pollution: in the air and in the lights. And him, a smidge of a shadow on the roof, dark and smudged and smoggy. Resentments and words and dismissals hooked into his shoulders. Words that still cling to him now, buried under his skin.

Alone, on the roof, anger and determination the only thing holding the smudges of his form together.

Takashi Shirogane nods. He loosens his grip, stretches his arms over his head. When he lowers them, he claps Keith on the back. It isn't that hard, but the shock makes Keith stumble forward, turn his head in surprise.

"I'd like to see that," Takashi Shirogane says, his smile growing in the fading light. "I don't think you're ready to pilot just yet, but that doesn't mean you can't. I'll keep my eyes out for you when you graduate."

The strangest thing isn't the conversation anymore, isn't the location, isn't the fact that Takashi Shirogane (Takashi Shirogane!) is talking to him, but his tone. It's light. It's genuine. It's hopeful. Keith isn't sure what to say, or do, or react. He's never heard something quite like it before.

He stares.

"Hey, now, you look like a deer in the headlights!" Takashi Shirogane's laugh is short. "I think you'd be an excellent pilot. There's no reason not to say that. You've got the spark, kid. Just maybe a bit too much of it, hm?" 

Keith doesn't know how much Takashi Shirogane knows, but he can feel the knowledge, as if Takashi Shirogane read his file in the office (crammed more full than anyone else's) and instead of a full reprimand, decided to take the information with him to the roof to deliver his disapproval in a sidelong glance and half shrug.

It has more impact than every warning he's ever received from the administration, or his instructors, or his peers. The hero (Earth's hero, his hero), headed to space, landed for long enough to tell Keith something he's never heard before. He bites his lip, fidgets his fingers, watches the sky darken and darken and feels the air grow still, but not cold. 

"Can I ask you something, um, Mr. Shirogane, sir?"

Takashi Shirogane hums, hands on his hips. "Alright. On one condition."

"Sir?"

"You have to call me Shiro."

"Um, alright, Shiroga-... Shiro. How did you know?"

The words don't come right away - and Keith doesn't expect them to. He isn't sure Taka- Shiro even has an answer. He isn't sure why he asked. His mind hovers on taking it back, but he doesn't dare. 

The anger's gone.

It's strange, in its own way. The familiar churn in his head, gone. Like a pressure at the back of his eyes lifted. The world righting itself after tumbling down a hill. The sudden cut of white noise to silence. The rush of adrenaline flooding out the pain, ebbing away to an emptiness. Keith isn't sure he's felt this for a very, very long time. 

When the answer finally comes, it's alongside the sun disappearing over the horizon, the furthest point in Keith's life (but not for Shiro: Shiro isn't there with him at the edge of the known universe, Shiro's universe has edges Keith can only dream of). It comes with a head turn (his, Shiro's), a light pressure on his shoulder. Reds bleaching blacks in their hair and clothes, dyeing the rocks deep into shadows. Into night.

"I've been alone before, too," Shiro says. "So try and keep out of trouble, alright? For both of us."

It's all he needs to say.


End file.
